I am one of the authors of the books "Multitool Linux" from Addison-Wesley and "Java Application Development on Linux" from Prentice-Hall. I've been using perl in a sort of haphazard fashion since perl 4, and I've only recently "come back" to serious perl programming after a break of about 6 years. My, how things have progressed! I am working on some packages that I plan to put into CPAN to provide a nice, clean perl interface to a rather old but still surprisingly widely used 4GL tool called "FilePro."